The Friar and the Cipher Read Online Free PDF

enrollee was, to say the least, unusual. Aristotle quickly ceased being a student and became what amounted to a faculty member. It also did not take long before Aristotle found some significant areas of disagreement with his boss. Principally, he thought the notion of Forms as the highest plane of knowledge was hooey. He did not think much of the philosopher-king idea either.
    From there, in reasonably short order, Aristotle and Plato found that they disagreed on almost everything. Plato was fond of higher, ethereal, unknowable truths, and Aristotle thought knowledge began with and flowed from that which could be observed. Plato, the former wrestler, was a manly man who dressed simply. He probably growled. Aristotle, on the other hand, was skinny, dressed in the most fashionable togas, wore lots of rings, and spoke with a lisp. Plato is known to have referred to him as “a mind on legs,” and scrawny legs at that. Aristotle, who had the money to do so, had also amassed a vast private library far grander than that of Plato, a disparity that was unlikely to draw the men closer. Reports that the two grew to loathe each other are probably overstated, but the notion of mere good-spirited intellectual rivalry is almost certainly too mild.
    One thing that each of these philosophers never did, however, was underestimate the ability of the other and, when Plato died in 347 BC, empiricism or no, Aristotle assumed that the leadership of the Academy would fall to him. When he found out that Plato had instead granted the title to his own cousin, the foul-tempered Speusippus, whom Aristotle considered a dolt, Aristotle packed up and left. (Speusippus eventually justified Aristotle's faith in him by being forced to commit suicide after he was humiliated in a debate by Diogenes the Cynic.)
    Aristotle headed back across the Aegean to where he had grown up and went to work for a minor king, the floridly named Hermias the Eunuch. Hermias, whose disability did little to improve his humor, was an authoritarian tyrant, but he also harbored ambitions to bring the flower of Greek culture to the déclassé provinces. He welcomed Aristotle, even encouraged him to marry his either niece, daughter, or former concubine, Pythias, who was twenty-one years younger than the great philosopher.
    Aristotle moved around a bit after his marriage. Then Phillip of Macedonia, whose father had been treated by Aristotle's father, asked him to become tutor to his son, the thirteen-year-old Alexander, later to be known as “The Great.” It must have been frustrating for one of the greatest minds in history to attempt to instruct a young, single-minded, bloodthirsty maniac in the niceties of higher thought. After four years, Aristotle gave up, returned to Athens, and, after getting passed over once again for the top post at the Academy, started his own school near the Temple of Apollo Lyceus (Apollo as a wolf), which he called the Lyceum (thus providing a convenient name for a theater in virtually every major city in the English-speaking world).
    It was at the Lyceum that Aristotelian thought flowered. Aristotle taught in a method much like Socrates—he walked about, followed by his students, lecturing and engaging in discussions of whatever Aristotelian concept happened to be on the agenda. (The term
peripatetic,
meaning “walking about,” came directly from the Lyceum.) Though Aristotle, unlike Socrates, wrote things down, almost nothing of what he wrote for posterity survives. Most of his sometimes cryptic, often ambiguous lecture notes, however, were saved.
    Aristotle's concept of God, such as it was, was completely consistent with his methodology and, not surprisingly, rejected the vagueness of Plato's Ideals. Everything, he postulated, was based on motion, and nothing moves unless it is acted on by something else. But in order for this great progression to begin, there must be something that caused motion without having been acted upon itself. This Aristotle